By Amulya Ganguli

It took only a day for the communists to switch from gloating over the "success" of the recent all-India bandh to offering explanations for their disruptive act.

To the charge that the shutdown cost the country "thousands of crores", Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) general secretary Prakash Karat said that the "cry was being raised by the very quarters that received tax concessions worth thousands of crores in the last budget".

Similarly, countering allegations about the Left joining hands with the anti-minority Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Karat claimed that he was amused by the "corporate" media's concern for the CPI-M's "ideological purity".

Behind these self-serving explanations was apparently the suspicion that such closures were more indicative of a party's political bankruptcy than a demonstration of its popular clout.

The recourse to bandhs or hartals, as such general strikes were earlier called, has long been a feature of communist politics. As a latecomer to mainstream politics, the BJP, which gained prominence only from the early 1990s, hasn't always gone in for this form of protest, which is associated with street violence.

If the BJP joined the Left in calling for such a shutdown this time, the reason perhaps was the need to mobilise its cadres at a time when the party had lost its earlier emotive temple plank. The same motive also drove the comrades, since their electoral reverses in the parliamentary polls and more recently in their West Bengal stronghold have compelled them to demonstrate their presence on the ground.

However, both the Left and the BJP may have come to realise that the economic price the country has to pay to subserve their political objective is much greater today when the economy is on a higher growth trajectory than before. Moreover, the economic buoyancy has made the country more active with longer working hours in offices and shops and more travelling byexecutives and ordinary people by road, train and air. A forced closure causes more irritation and inconvenience today than in the earlier decades.

As is obvious, the lifestyle of the increasingly affluent middle class has undergone a change with people thronging malls and multiplexes till at late night. It is not only the shopping plazas and restaurants which gain as a result but also the roadside vendors and taxi drivers. These sections suffered earlier too because of bandhs, but there has been a manifold increase in the scale of their losses.

It is with these sections in mind that even the chief minister of the Left-ruled West Bengal, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, said some time ago that he was "opposed to any kind of bandh". However, he ruefully acknowledged that "I belong to a party and when my party called a bandh, I kept mum. But I have decided to open my mouth next time".

Although he did not open his mouth Monday, his unhappiness was obvious because he was said to have walked out of a CPI-M politburo meeting. However, his distress was not so much about the closure as about the apparent coordination between the Left and the BJP on the issue.

This proximity was disclosed by none other than BJP leader L.K. Advani, who wrote in his blog that two communist leaders had visited him, although they had admitted that they were entering "forbidden territory". Bhattacharjee's apprehension is that this closeness will alienate the minorities from his party in West Bengal, thereby undermining its prospects in next year's assembly elections.

The general strikes have traditionally been regarded by the Left as a means to promote a militant, revolutionary temper in the working class and among its sympathisers in other social groups. But the BJP's reasons at the moment are less clear-cut. Formally, of course, it characterised the bandh as an expression of popular anger against the inflationary trends and especially the fuel price hikes.

But this was mainly for public consumption. Its real objective, of course, was to embarrass the government. However, the party cannot be unaware that this communistic tactic will not go down well with its traditional support base comprising, in the main, the trading community and the middle class.

To the former, a bandh means the loss of a day's earnings while to the latter, it denotes the BJP's adoption of a tension-ridden political path at variance with its supposed preference for a well-ordered society.

The BJP has already lost a segment of the middle class vote by its opposition to the Indo-US nuclear deal last year along with the Left. Now, it may have hurt itself further by siding with the communists to bring the country to a halt. Bhattacharjee and other West Bengal comrades are believed to have told Karat and Co. that withdrawing support from the Manmohan Singh government on the nuclear deal might have been ideologically correct but was

a political and tactical mistake.

Arguably, the bandh was also a political and tactical mistake since the people no longer seem to approve of the country being brought to a standstill. What the BJP seems to underestimate is the attraction which the government's market-oriented policies have for the people in general because of the greater earning opportunities which they provide across the board. A high growth rate benefits all, and not the rich alone.

While the Left rejects such an economic line as "neo-liberal" and a submission to the US "imperialism", the BJP's traditional supporters have no such ideological objections.

The government seems to have realised this preference of the average person for economic reforms, which is why it opted for the fuel price hikes and is now speaking of foreign investment in the retail sector. Since a bandh has a crippling effect on the economy, its sponsors are harming their own political prospects.